


Pulse

by piotsa



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-05-31 07:23:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6461137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piotsa/pseuds/piotsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What did it say about him that his Soulmate was a would-be killer?<br/>What did it say about him that, despite how he reassured Foggy, he still loved her?"</p>
<p>A canon compliant soulmate au set before the show begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pulse

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic ever and I wrote it mostly because I love the idea of soulmates!Matt&Elektra. They're pretty messed up in the show but I still love them. Very slight spoilers for season 2, but once you've seen past episode 6 you should be fine.
> 
> Kinda want to do a Elektra POV chapter because this is pretty Matt-centric, kinda want to wait and see if anyone would be bothered reading it, so for now this is a oneshot.

Matt was born with a Mark.

Well, technically it should be marks in the plural, to be more accurate. Several dots of different sizes, dark red, slightly raised. But together they were all the one Soul Mark, randomly scattered on the skin of his right wrist and up his inner arm.

“Gave us a real scare when you were born, Matty,” his father told him more than once. “Thought it might be some kind of rash, allergic reaction or somethin’.”

The largest mark was right on his pulse point. When he was younger and running from the other kids and their cruel taunts, he would find a refuge on the fire escape in the building across the street. He would sit there for hours at a time, watching the mark jump in time with his increased heart beat. He wondered, wherever they were in the world in that moment, if his Soulmates heartbeat was in time with his.

But his heartbeat had never spontaneously increased as a result of his Soulmate, so he supposed it didn't work like that. 

“They’re just jealous of you, Matty. And why wouldn’t they be? Mark as big as your’s means something. Not to mention the fact you’re kicking all their asses in every test you take," his dad reassured him every time.

His dad was the reason he studied so hard which, in turn, was the reason the other kids made fun of him. Battlin’ Jack Murdock wanted the best for his boy. He wanted Matt to succeed where he had failed, and he didn’t mean just in academics.

Matt had seen his father’s withered Mark before. He had seen it all too often as he patched up his dad’s bloodied hands after every fight. The bone white Mark rested on the fleshy part of his hand in between his thumb and index finger. He didn't know if it was just his imagination but it felt cold to the touch.

It had been white for as long as Matt could remember. A sign as clear as day that Jack Murdock's Soulmate was dead.

He didn’t know much about his mother, wherever she was, but he knew it wasn’t her’s.

He wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.

But his dad wasn't bitter about the hand he'd been dealt. He got knocked down, he got back up and that was that. And Matt loved him for it.

Matt remembers watching his dad box, nervously rubbing at the raised flesh on his wrist. It was a habit that would continue even after the accident, when he could only listen to the fights. It got a lot harder then, not only because he couldn’t see his dad’s condition, but because it wasn’t just the announcer he could hear.

He heard it all. The announcer’s bellowing voice, the sighs of the tired assistant standing beside him, a jostle as he knocked against the microphone, and underneath it all the crackle of static from the crappy TV his dad bought second hand off a friend, just loud enough to knock all the other sounds out of focus.

Every rustle of fabric, every shallow breath had Matt on edge, wondering how his dad was doing.

Still, there were always those nights where reality seemed worse than his imagination.

“Murdock takes another hit! And another! And it looks like - It's a knockout folks!”

The announcer’s voice rang in his ears. Matt sucked in a breath and squeezed his wrist so tight he nearly cut off the circulation. Then he wondered if his Soulmate on the other end could feel it and loosened his grip. His dad would be fine. A little banged up, sure, but he would be fine.

He always was.

***

He had hoped for it, just a little. The same way he always did when he felt a connection with someone. Matt would always know the person wasn’t his Soulmate, but there was a part of him buried deep down that still hoped for it. To be completely known and understood. Accepted.

When they were together he would wrap his fingers around her wrists where the Mark would be if they were in fact Soulmates. If he didn’t know any better he would say they felt delicate under his strong fingers. And with each and every jump of her pulse his heart leaped into his mouth. But was that the Bond, or was that just Elektra? 

Still, he hoped in secret, because he knew Elektra well enough to know she would laugh.

And that was true until the night they broke in to Fogwell’s Gym.

They sparred for the first time and he knew. They were perfect together, both of them lunging and grabbing at each other. Ducking and dodging and laughing. It was exhilarating. 

He had always loved the gym. The sweat, the leather, the faded scents of blood and bleach. It was a place where people had lived, where they had fought and fell and broken and gotten back up to do it all over again. And now he never how they felt, now he felt alive like he never had before.

He had never felt so alive before knowing her, never been so true to himself.

With his father, he had loved with all his heart, but Matt buried the vicious little part of himself that reared up whenever the bullies taunted him, buried it under schoolbooks as they chanted, “Come outside, Daredevil!” His dad wanted him to be safe from the violence of this world, but it had already crawled up inside him. It would break his heart if he knew.

Stick had shown him how to let the devil out, to turn his anger in to kicks and punches. But there was no love there. Stick wanted a soldier, a cold blooded killer. He wanted a weapon. Jack Murdock might have been dead and gone, but Matt had known his father’s love for too long to be the soldier Stick wanted.

Foggy was probably the closest he’d come to before he met Elektra. He knew a slightly different version of Matt, but Matt-Murdock-the-law-student was no less a fighter than Matt-Murdock-Stick’s-student. Foggy knew how much Matt cared, and more than that, he cared too.

Still, he knew from the beginning that Foggy wasn’t his Soulmate. Foggy didn’t dance around the topic of his blindness, he certainly wasn’t going to avoid the topic of Marks.

“Dude, your Mark is huge! Have you met them yet?” he asked excitedly on their second day of being roommates. 

“No, not yet. Uh, what about you?” Matt had to admit he was taken aback. Even with such a visible Mark, he didn’t get a lot of questions about it. Most people were a little more tactful about Soul Marks. Foggy Nelson, he would come to learn, was not like most people.

“No, never seen anyone else with this bad boy before.” Matt’s radar sense told him Foggy was twisting around, lifting his shaggy hair off of the back of his neck. “No tramp stamp jokes, you hear me?”

Matt had barely gotten the awkward, “Um-” out before Foggy interrupted, “Shit, man I forgot. It’s a little triangle, about the size of a nickel, on the back of my neck.” Foggy stayed holding his hair up as he described it. “It’s completely green, not like a gross sick green, but like a dark evergreen kind of green, you know?”

Matt was silent for a moment. For Foggy to just share his Mark with someone he knew for a fact wasn't his Soulmate was a big deal. But Foggy didn’t seem to think so. Matt decided he could work with that.

“Well, I hear it doesn’t count as a tramp stamp unless it’s on your ass, so you should be safe.”

“Hey!” Foggy demanded. “How d’you I don’t have another one down there?”

They had both broke down in to giggles at that. Anyone would be lucky to have Foggy as their Soulmate. There were some dark nights where he wished...

But there had always been that part of him that Foggy couldn’t know. That need to feel his his knuckles bruise and bleed as they hit something.

He could tell Elektra knew. A perfect right hook here, an elegant kick there, but with an underlying wildness to it all, like the omnipresent crackle of television static.

It had been too hard to tell before. Her presence threw everything else out of focus and any sense of logic out the window.

But he knew then, sure as anything that they were Soulmates.

“Why did you never tell me?” he asked afterwards, lying in the boxing ring, his body aching in the best possible way. He was confident he was right but still curious. Surely she had seen his Mark, known it matched hers?

“Tell you what?” He could hear the slow pop of her joints as she stretched out on the floor of the ring.

“That we’re Soulmates.”

She went quiet for a moment. Her heartbeat remained as steady as ever.

“Don’t say you believe in all that rubbish,” she scoffed. “Come on, Matthew. You’re smarter than that.”

He pressed forward. This was too important. “Elektra?”

“You would really let some birthmark decide the rest of your life for you? Decide who you fall in love with?” she exhaled deeply, not quite with a huff, but close. He couldn’t help but smile a little.

“I’d already decided to fall in love with you,” he said honestly. “Nothing in the world could change that.”

“Not even if the Marks didn’t match?”

“But they do, don’t they?” he asked, his chest feeling tight. He was telling the truth - it wouldn’t change anything. But it didn’t matter because he was right. He knew he was right. He wanted her to admit it.

Like him she had been lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, but now he could sense her turning towards him, considering.

Propping herself up on one elbow, Elektra flipped his arm over to examine his wrist. She slowly traced the outline of the dots with one finger, barely brushing around his Mark, her mood unreadable. Her touch, light as it was, felt like fire on his sensitive skin.

He could feel her hovering over him, the air thick with whatever was holding her back. His heart felt like a dam that was about to burst. But then she ducked her head down, kissing his pulse point, his Mark.

“Yes.” He could have sworn he felt the heat of her kiss seep into his blood, burning throughout his veins.

“Yes,” Elektra whispered against his skin, “I suppose they do.”

***

Matt couldn’t remember the last time he felt so overwhelmed. Elektra’s excitement and Sweeney’s mix of anger fear defiance clouded his senses. Everything was too loud, too warm, too much. The buzzing in his ears grew louder and louder until -

“Let it out. Let it out,” she said and he did.

He let the devil out and he could sense her delight at what she saw. He felt delight too, just a little. Delight at this monster finally getting what he deserved. 

He pulled back. The buzzing had ceased. His chest felt too tight.

Her fingers brushed his Mark only to grip his wrist tight and his senses screamed at him. His pulse hammered against her soft skin as she held his wrist with an iron grip. Elektra placed the knife in his hand and for one terrible second, he thought about it. Would it really be so wrong?

Of course it would. He hated himself a little more. The knife fell through his lax fingers.

Over the clanging of the knife hitting the marble tile, he heard an almost imperceptible hitch in her usually ever steady heartbeat. And that was it.

The first few days after she ran, Matt thought she might come back. She didn’t believe in the Soul Marks but she had felt the connection between them. He knew she had. She would come back and he would be angry but they would fix it because they were Soulmates, weren’t they?

When the days turned into weeks, he knew Elektra was gone. And he didn’t know whether he was glad or not. What she had been planning to do was awful, unthinkable.

But still, he missed her.

He stayed awake at night, debating with himself.

She was half of his soul.

She would have murdered Roscoe Sweeney.

When he was with her it was like she was the only real thing in the world, like the rest of his life was a dream that belonged to someone else.

When she had Sweeney tied to a chair with a knife at his throat, he could smell her adrenaline as it steadily increased.

The thought hit him in the weeks following her departure. What did it say about him that his Soulmate was a would-be killer?

What did it say about him that, despite how he reassured Foggy, he still loved her?

He could try find Elektra, but that was the wrong decision for both of them. She was the one who left. She didn’t want to be found. Every time he thought about how his Soulmate left him the pain would bloom fresh in his chest, fill up his lungs, choke his throat with tears.

He swallowed it back down.

Matt had a law degree to finish. He had a roommate who worried about him. He never told Foggy that Elektra was his Soulmate because while other people treated Matt like he was made of glass, Foggy treated him like the person he was. He didn't want that to change and he sure as hell didn't want Foggy's pity.

He was also slightly concerned Foggy might try to hunt Elektra down. That was something that was to be prevented at all costs.

So he put on a brave face and it hurt less often. He and Foggy landed prestigious internships and he pretended to forget about her.

God how he hated it. In his darker times, he could imagine what she would say. He could imagine her lilting accent, rich and beautiful.

“Well, if you enjoy having your soul sucked out by drones in business suits, then by all means, Matthew, stick around.”

A week after one such episode, he did what he had been dying to do for what felt like eternity. He used his fists to make sure that man would never touch his daughter again. He enjoyed it and the guilt never came. It felt a little easier to breathe.

He wrapped his bruised knuckles and not for the first time since she left, he ran his fingers over the Mark. His pulse was steady and he wondered if she could feel it.

***

She could.


End file.
